...And Democracy Continues Its March

"Fetters and headsmen were the coarse instruments which tyranny
formerly employed; but the civilization of our age has perfected
despotism itself, though it seemed to have nothing to learn."
de Tocqueville, Democracy In America (pg.97)

America really is entering a period of greater democracy. Bill
Clinton's election campaign has never stopped. Polls are still
being taken about his latest struggles. From the New Hampshire
primary to the health care reform campaign, TV has tried to draw
us into his endless fights with other mighty bureaucrats - from
George Bush to Robert Dole to Saddam Hussein. Even more, we are
expected to cheer Clinton in fights against us. "How well
do you think that Clinton succeeded in communicating the need
for sacrifice to the American people."

The 1992 elections had the biggest turnout of a presidential election
in twenty years. From elections to polls to talk-radio to the
"internet," never has the average citizen had so many
chances for a voice in their government. But this hasn't helped
the hapless citizen. The average, passive voter probably is poorer
and has less control over his or her life than ever before.

To understand how people lose this game, we have to look at how
the game is really played.

In pro basketball, fouling is part of the game. Some teams play
with a little more finesse, other use a little more brute strength.
The honest fan doesn't look down on the player who fouls, only
the player who gets caught. So the player is allowed to do anything
- except to question the real rules of the game. If Kurt Rambus
(a "physical player" from a few years back) said at
a press conference "Yes, I intend to foul people, that's
my job," he could be expelled from the league.

American Democracy works the same way. If we play the game, we
can question everything except the real rules of the game. But
here the game is something that dominates our lives.

The game today is exchange. It dominates our daily lives when
we must exchange our time at work for our survival. It dominates
the world system when the electronic world market allocates all
resources by exchange.

Poll takers constantly ask about OJ Simpson's murder trial, the
best way to make America more productive or how to keep children
off drugs. But answering these sorts of questions only makes people
think more in terms of life continuing exactly as it is now. The
pollsters' slave questions talk only about how this society should
best be run. They assume that everyone will live in nuclear family,
go to work, work really hard for low pay, come home and look at
a TV star on the moving screen.

The Illusion

We attack democracy as such, we don't want "real democracy"
instead of "fake democracy." Today's system of vacuum-packed
choices is the flip-side of the market perfecting itself. The
progress of exchange, of capital, is also the creation of capital's
own model of thinking.

All forms of democratic ideology appeal to a model of human behavior
that implies each person is wholly separate social agent who only
affects others in fixed, definable ways. Perfect democracy - constant
polling, an almost permanent election campaign - merely weighs
each impulse in the market place of ideas.

Democracy is the language of "common sense" in a world
where capitalism controls people's senses. It defends the right,
for example, for a man to shout cat-calls at a woman because that
man's actions are simply "free speech" not connected
to any social action.

Today's democracy never has to attack its true enemies but only
phantasms within itself. It is only the exchange of one sort of
rhetoric for another. So all rhetoric of this sort is empty because
is only used to shout at another. Most voters vote for the candidate
they think will win instead of the candidate they agree with.
This is logical. Why should they care? Everyone knows that things
will remain about the same no matter what they do. So why not
support a winner instead of a loser? No one cares that politicians
lie. They care if the politician gets caught lying. This proves
the politician is weak and so a loser.

If you make a choice passively, someone could just as well act
on your choice without you having to do anything. Of course presidential
elections are only held every four years but if Clinton responds
to each month's polls, the government truly hears the passive
"voice of the people."

"Would you like me to shoot you now or wait till I get home?"
Elmer Fudd to Daffy Duck. "Should the federal government
cut services or raise taxes?" Bill Clinton to the working
class.

Of course all the choices the media serves up to us have hidden
clauses that change their apparent meaning. The federal government
reduces its entire budget. Then the local puppets frame the choice
of cuts for local voters. These voters then get to support one
austerity measure or another.

But this is because the marketplace of ideas works against us.
But is this because this market is unfair? No! Even a fair marketplace
of ideas simply decides the best direction for capital. Our disadvantage
in talk-show dialogues is the same as our disadvantage compared
to employers or banks.

Why Democracy Now?

"We must learn to make the process of governing as
entertaining as we have learned to make [electoral] politics entertaining."

Max Frankel, Editor, The New York Times

The game of letting the ruled participate in their own exploitation
not new. The present subtle switch from George Bush's upper-class
style to Bill Clinton's democratic style is a counter-part to
the rise of the mega-capitalists. The eighties ended with stock
market crashes that heralded the end of junk bonds as a strategy
for total capital to expand. The economy could no longer be artificially
expanded by the easy-money financial manipulations of Michael
Milken, George Bush, Paul Volker and Company.

Instead of artificially expanding, it is now sucking all resources
into it's empty center. The faction of capitalists at the very
top are the billionaires - financiers like Adnan Khoshaggi, entrepreneurs
like Bill Gates and a host of invisible characters. This small
group had their wealth and power tremendously increased by the
expansion of financial manipulations and electronic world markets.
Currency and "derivative" speculation had expanded until
today they involve trillions of dollars changing hands on a weekly
basis. This game uses and expands the power of this ultra-rich
class.

As today's crisis system moves to marshall every possible force
in its defense, uses our choices about how best to be exploited
against us. This system is the dictatorship of the commodity,
the world market and of the billionaires. But simultaneously it
is the rule of democracy. Once all action and every person can
be translated into empty choices, those choices can be exchanged
with each other like dollars or spectacular images.

If people are given a free choice about how to sell themselves
to the world market, then the system in total will run much more
smoothly. When commentator say "let the public decide the
best health plan" they mean let people find a plan that gives
the insurance companies the highest premiums that workers can
pay and still survive on. Managers will give people free-reign
to decide which way to sell themselves to the market.

Democracy became the dominant ideology right after "tight-money"/slow
growth became the main economic policy. Tight money reigned in
financial speculation and began the present system of reorganization-terror.
It goaded lower-level capitalists to produce more without spending
more. This caused corporations to attack both workers and the
previously ignored level of middle-management.

The financial capitalists' power depends on the expansion of an
abstract chunk of money. So democracy is an ideal strategy. The
financial capitalist don't care whether they invest in defense
contracting, prisons, computers to track drug-offenders, or for-profit
hospitals.

Thus the ruling party switched from the party of corruption -
the republicans under Bush, to the party of participation - the
Democrats under Clinton. But naturally democracy implies many
more switches after this.

Historical Democracy

As capitalism has developed, democracy was held back by local
authoritarians and by the capitalist's fear that the idea of democracy
would make people ungovernable.

Now that capital has perfected democratic participation, all previous
forms of capitalism can be seen as instances of democracy. It
is thus not surprising that democratic think-tanks are able to
give good advice to dictatorships like Pinochet's Chile. It is
not surprising that Hitler came to power through the democratic
operations of the Wiemar republic. (There was some cheating but
we already know cheating is part of any game.)

Democracy is now the ideal dialogue of capital. Participation
in this process is speaking the language of the market whether
it is participatory, authoritarian or technical. The methods of
military "psy-war" propaganda are the methods of the
modern democratic political campaign are the methods of modern
government are the methods of leftists discussing ways to improve
the system. The enemy is isolated, personalized and attacked using
claims that are most likely to get automatic reactions from the
isolated spectator.

Every apparent rebellion that failed, every useless exercise of
freedom, reappears in the accounting of capital. The system of
the Soviet Union was identical to the system of war-time production
in our "free-market" system. Thus the final end of the
Soviet Union has given the extended insurance system a quantitative
measure of state-capitalism versus private enterprise.

The more people relate on the level of "pure democracy,"
the more they relate on the level of abstract, formal equality.
And the more they have an incentive to solve the system's problems.
Everyone becomes a bureaucrat versus everyone else. Everyone is
equal as long as they each play the same role. We are all equal
as consumers, voters, TV watchers, or citizens. That is, we can
all be exchanged in our functions.

To write a letter to a congressman is to enter into a huge system
of data-creation that ultimately makes people less powerful. The
ultimate passivity of a permitted, experimentally controlled role
makes it predictable.

The stock market, the media consultants, the political think-tanks,
the pollsters, the market researchers, and the big charities constitute
an immense electronic memory bank and simulation of all the permitted
choices that "consumers," "the public," the
spectators, the passive make. The election industry speculates
about each way that each given choice is framed and then creates
strategies for extracting maximum profits from each citizen's
choice.

With this automation of control, democratic regimes are now the
most cost effective. This is part of today's intensification of
democracy. Once ideology sees formal democracy in all acts of
government, cost accounting demands that redundant local tyrants
be removed. Even in backward areas like Haiti or Somalia, capital
moves to replace local butchery with the "accidental"
mass murders of democracy.

Decisions?

Revolutionaries oppose every version of democratic ideology. On
one hand, after a revolution there won't be a need to fixate on
the process of reaching each decision. For example, one person
could decide a day's delivery schedule in a communal warehouse
without oppressing the other workers. Other workers might prefer
to spend their time walking on the beach than double checking
each decision. The dispatcher would have no coercive power over
the other participants in the warehouse. Deciding the schedule
would not give her entrenched privilege that she could accumulate
and exchanged for other things. For their own enjoyment, the worker
might want to collectively decide the menu of a communal kitchen
even it was a less efficient use of time.

No scheme for managing society will by itself create a new society.
Highly democratic, highly authoritarian and mixed schemes are
now used to administer capitalism. The basic quality of capitalism
is that the average person has little or no control over their
daily life. Wage labor dominates society. You must exchange your
life to buy back your survival. Whether people under capitalism
make the decisions about which records they buy, which inmates
serve long sentences, what color the street lights are, etc.,
is irrelevant.

The community that escapes capitalism will involve people directly
controlling the way they live. This is the individual and collective
refusal of work, commodity production, and exploitation. This
will involve much collective decision making and much individual
decision making. The transformation cannot be reduced to a set
way of making decisions or a fixed plan of action.

Not believing in democracy means not automatically
knowing how to proceed if people have a profound disagreements.
So be it.

Anti-democratic Communism

Communists do not say that without capitalism we can guarantee
that humans will create a human community. It says that with capitalism,
humans cannot create a human community. It sees that any movement
for a true community will oppose capitalist social order and social
relationships all along the way. The motivating force will not
come with a communist blue-print. It will come from living of
proletarians creating a new social relation.

The spirit of collective power, of a community of masters, is
exactly the opposite of the democratic spirit. Democracy drowns
the individual in the choices of the majority. It presumes that
the individual choice is always hostile to the power of the masses.
Thus democratic ideology creates the paranoia that everything
contrary to its current formalism of process is the same as Stalinist
dictatorship.

The spirit of proletarian struggle can be seen when a group of
partisans fan-out to defend a city. Each wing has the power to
act alone in attacking capitalist forces. Each wing is just as
willing to give in to the authority of the other proletarians
when they indicate they know the terrain better.

The formal decision making process will depend on the situation.
Unanimity, a majority vote, or minority action will be used depending
on the terrain of the battle. It is not a matter of fixed rights
but of people supporting each other.

Those who are taking back their lives must be strong and alive,
not fair and democratic. When a mass of comrades satisfy their
desires by looting a supermarket, they have acted directly on
their collective wills. But it is ridiculous to say this action
was fairer than them collectively voting for a congresswoman/man
or voting to raise their taxes to pay for more police. They violated
"process" by not polling everyone beforehand. It's not
a matter of whether looters could ever have the right number of
people together to "have permission" to act. Proletarians
should always act as actively allied creators of a new order,
not as passively equal citizens.

Virtually all of the past two hundred years' lurches towards the
potlatch, towards communism, have begun undemocratically. The
rioters of LA did not require the formal permission of a decision-making
body before creating their explosion. The insurrection that started
the Spanish Civil War in 1936 began with a spontaneous reaction
of workers to Francisco Franco's military coup. The wildcat general
strike in May of 68 in Paris began with a spontaneous rejection
of the entire society that was fueled by street fighting.

These same insurrections have tended to end when the fetish of
democracy reasserted itself. May 68 reached its limits with union
officials still controlling the gates of the striking factories.

These elected representatives of the workers separated the movement
until everything cooled down. (Again there was certainly a lot
of cheating in the French CGT's "union democracy" but
this wouldn't have changed the final result. See "How To
`Go Beyond The SI' In Ten Simple Steps," this issue) In Spain
36, democratically elected anarchist union leaders controlled
the tendency to communalize all society. They were able to convince
the most militant workers that it would be undemocratic to impose
socialism without the approval of the passive majority.

The dispossessed should not be fair but be alive and strong. To
be anti-democratic is to reject the fetish of democracy, to not
give any voting process an inherently superior position over the
total process of living. Proletarians, those who have nothing
to lose from the destruction of this society and know it, must
become anti-democratic to achieve their ends.

Workers must seize control of their workplace or their neighborhood.
Not to manage them in the same way as before but to have as much
power as possible. Even if at a certain point a group of proletarians
use votes to decide the path taken, they cannot allow democratic
blessings to justify their actions any more than they can allow
reformism, unionism, or pacifism to mystify their actions. The
number in favor of a decision will be only one factor among many
influencing those who refuse the democratic fetish.

Minorities Confronting Democracy

The passive of today accept democracy more than ever. This weakness
may be partially offset by the tremendous willingness of the system's
propagandists to rely on raw democracy to accomplish it's goals.
Freedom of choice is no longer only given as a concession but
is pushed constantly as a weapon.

At the point when revolutionaries realize that they have nothing
to lose from the destruction of this society, they may realize
the mirage of it's democracy. The LA riots were the most undemocratic
action imaginable - absolutely no permission was ever asked by
those who looted, either from authorities or from unions or from
workers councils. Still there was no conscious critique of democracy
in that short time in LA.

So we can imagine many more insurrections, like Paris 68, where
masses with many democratic and other bourgeois illusions act
in a practically communist manner. Here, if the word "democracy"
is used by people to describe reconquering their own lives, self-conscious
communists wouldn't mindlessly attack it. Rather, an anti-democratic
minority would spell-out the practical actions that are necessary
to achieve a new society and show how little formal democracy
has to do with them. In those conditions, an anti-democratic minority
is in a good position to fight the mystifications that have served
as breaks on the earlier movements.